


Pop Goes the Weasel

by rhymeswithcabbage



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, First Meetings, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Love Potion/Spell, Misunderstandings, Pining, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-22 13:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22883590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhymeswithcabbage/pseuds/rhymeswithcabbage
Summary: Molly Prewett just wants Arthur Weasley to notice her.
Relationships: Arthur Weasley/Molly Weasley
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Pop Goes the Weasel

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up a lot more angsty than I’d planned when the idea came to me.
> 
> Assumptions I’ve shamelessly made while writing this (no regrets! :P) :  
> (i)Ironing isn’t a thing in the wizarding world. Neither is cardboard.  
> (ii)All parchment is unruled in the wizarding world. Spiral binding isn’t a thing.  
> (iii)Coal powered iron boxes come in boxes with instructions on the side.  
> (iv)Spellotape hasn’t been invented yet  
> (v)Wizarding literature on muggles at the time was vague and more satirical ridicule than actual fact
> 
> Also, I think the tense took a turn somewhere in the middle but I’m too tired to go back and change it so please bear with me.

Arthur Weasley was Strange.

He was a Gryffindor a year above her. His hair was red and his eyes were blue and Molly couldn’t understand him.

He wore impeccable robes on weekdays ( _How_ did he get them to stay so flat and wrinkle free? She suspected advanced magic.) and worn jumpers with holes in the elbows on weekends.

Other boys argued over which girl was prettier and bruised their bums practicing for Quidditch tryouts. Arthur Weasley snuck out to Hogsmeade, always coming back with some strange looking gizmo or the other. When she asked, he’d say “I don’t know!” like it was the best news ever, and grin like he’d found treasure.

Other boys spent their evenings studying or flying or playing Exploding Snap or chess or gobstones in the common room. Arthur Weasley was in the library, in the _Muggle Studies_ section, of all places, with a large, ancient tome open in front of him while he inspected strange gizmos from a box made of strange thick parchment ( _cardboard_ , he called it, though it didn’t look much like a card or a board) that seemed to stand on its own somehow.

He’d called a ‘shoebox’. She didn’t understand how a box could make shoes. Maybe it was for storage? But it wasn’t even magically expanded. Could it even fit one pair? She didn’t think so.

Arthur always carried the box around with him, in class or in the Quidditch stands as he cheered on his friends or on lazy days by the lake. Molly couldn’t see anything special about it. It was just an ordinary box, with ’ _Arty_ ’ written on the side in neat loopy letters that was very different from the chicken scratch in the old, worn notebook that Arthur took notes in as he studied the various tools. The notebook was another oddity in itself. It had lines running horizontally over the pages, how strange. And the pages were linked together with a strange shiny wire that looped in and out and around the pages over and over again along one edge, and it made her dizzy just looking at it. And he wrote in it with a weird metal rod with a bit of poky metal at one end, and he said it held the ink _inside_ and how was that even possible, what sorcery was this?

It’s not that she spent _tha_ t much time thinking about how strange he was, really. Just in the Great Hall during meals, when he grinned up at the sky every time he walked in, and in class when Binns’ droning became background noise to images of fiery hair falling in front of icy blue eyes and long fingered hands turning pages in that strange notebook covered with lines, and sometimes when she was lying in bed and listening to Taylor’s snoring from the bed next to hers, wondering if she’d ever pluck up the courage to talk to him.

One day. Maybe.

Besides, Arthur Weasley was Strange with a capital S. She didn’t understand him at all.

She couldn’t help wanting to.

=====

They spoke for the first time at her first ever meeting of the Committee Advocating Recognition of Redheads Owning to Time-old Stereotypes.

She’d been sorted into Gryffindor a year ago now. Now, she looked around at the sea of red around her, trying to school her features into neutrality, clutching her empty goblet and wondering if the sorting hat had made a good decision after all. She was more Hufflepuff material, honestly. Look at her, she couldn’t even mumble an “excuse me” at the tall auburn-haired girl standing in front of the punch table. And the tie clashed horribly with her hair.

She tugged at it, trying to calm her nerves.

She hadn’t even managed to catch a glimpse of Arthur.

Maybe this meeting was a bad idea. She could always come back next year.

“Excuse me.”

She jumped as a voice spoke from behind her. She turned around quickly to see ruddy hair falling in front of wide, nervous blue eyes.

He was about a foot taller than her. She’d known this, but she’d never _felt_ it till this moment, standing right in front of him for the first time, looking up at him. He fidgeted with his red tie. It clashed horribly with his hair.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he mumbled, and his cheeks darkened, red spreading to the tips of his ears.

Molly smiled. “Oh no, I was just lost in thought.” She held out her hand. “My name’s Molly. Molly Prewett.”

“Arthur Weasley,” He shot her a relieved smile and ran a hand through his hair before realizing she was waiting. He flushed darker and his hand clasped hers, surprisingly firm. His eyes were so _blue_. “Nice to meet you.”

“You know, your hair is _really_ red,” she blurted out before she could stop herself, and then froze, wide eyed. He laughed. “Shut up, dummy. So is yours!”

She shot him a hesitant smile. He grinned back. “C’mon, let’s get you some punch.”

=====

He was in the year above her. He helped her with charms when she couldn’t quite get the wand movement right, and laughed at her wide-eyed wonder when he told her about the hippogriffs they’d seen in Care of Magical Creatures, and read her tea leaves for her, predicting serenading centaurs and lemonade lakes and leaving her helpless with laughter (‘you’ll regret laughing when the great lake becomes refreshingly fruity on the 23rd of November, Molly. Molly! Stop laughing!’). He gave her one of his magically altered quills (‘pens’, he called them, so _strange_ ) to write with and they really were more convenient than quills, wizards were so impractical sometimes, and he showed her the wrinkle-remover box that was sort of triangular and weirdly fire powered but left clothes so toasty and warm and _smooth_ that she supposed it didn’t matter.

She told him about her annoying younger brothers, about how they were always getting up to some sort of mischief and how much she missed them. He told her about his dad, an auror who’d taken a reductor curse to the chest when he was barely a year old, and his mum, a muggle, the most beautiful woman in the world, who he’d lost to cancer when he was five. He spent his holidays with his grandmother, his dad’s mum, who wasn’t unkind but didn’t particularly care.

“Maybe because my dad ran off with a muggle. She’s never said it, but I’ve come to understand it’s frowned upon in the old pureblood families.” He leaned closer to her and whispered conspiratorily, “She gets especially pissy when I put the butterknife in the jam jar.”

He showed her the shoebox, the box his mum had left him. On the inside, in that familiar loopy writing, she’d written, ‘Never forget.’

There was a piece of paper separating the box into two parts. He explained that the smaller part had the things he knew how to use and the bigger part was the things he hadn’t quite figured out yet.

There were six things in the smaller part, including one of those ‘pens’.

“Where’s the shirt smoothener?”

“Oh, that was in a separate box. It had instructions on the sides, so,” He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

The bigger part was crammed with at least twenty oddly shaped items, none of which she recognized.

He flushed as he noticed her skeptical look. “It’s just a hobby. I just – it makes me feel closer to her, you know? Like this, this pen, she wrote with this once. And this...dental floss? I don’t know what it does, it’s string that smells strangely minty and I just. These are things she used, things she held, you know? And I want to know how she held them, how she used them, how they work, it’s all quite fascinating really, and I just-” He stopped abruptly, and his cheeks flamed brighter. “I’m sorry.”

She wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to apologize. She wanted to tell him he didn’t need to explain himself to her. She wanted to tell him she understood how much this meant to him. She wanted to tell him how much she appreciated that he’d chosen to share this with her. She wanted to tell him that she thought it was wonderful, beautiful, that he could find such passion in these curiosities that were probably commonplace in a world just a hair’s breadth away from their own, but that most people in the wizarding world considered ‘not magical enough’ or ‘beneath them’. She wanted to tell him how much she admired his spirit. How much she admired him.

“Could you teach me too?”

She’d never seen him smile so wide. It took her breath away.

=====

He ran up to her one day, once classes were done. Her friend Taylor grinned at her and winked.

“Make your move already, girl,” she whispered, and Molly laughed and shoved her playfully. “I’ll see you in the common room, Tay.”

“Update me later,” she winked again and skipped away.

“Molly, I did it, I found-“ He paused and grinned at her shyly, holding out his hand. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

A beat. She didn’t know who was moving her arm. She raised her hand. Her palm was in his. He interlaced their fingers.

And then he turned on his heel and raced down the corridor. Molly couldn’t help the surprised laugh as she let herself be dragged along.

=====

She stared, perplexed, as he raised the ‘wand’ to his lips. “What are you doing?”

His eyes sparkled as he winked at her. And then, much to her confusion, he _blew_ at it.

She gasped. Bubbles, so many of them, round and rainbow coloured and sparkling in the sunlight, scattering out of the end of the little stick, soaring up and down and every which way. He laughed at her delighted expression and dipped the stick back in the little bottle. She stared at him in awe. “How did you _do_ that?”

“Here, you try.” He laughed again at her excited grin. Almost bouncing up and down, she took the stick from him, gently. He’d already dipped it in that strange potion. There was a thin window of the colourless liquid in the circle at the end of the stick.

“What spell did you use again?” He chuckled, shaking his head.

“No spell at all, silly. Just hold it up to your mouth,“ he slowly moved her hand until the filmy circle was in front of her mouth. She pulled her head back a bit, wary. Who knew what he’d used to make that filmy thing? “This isn’t poisonous, right?”

He rolled his eyes at her. “It’s just soap solution, dummy, there’s nothing to be scared of. Just hold it right there and blow.”

She raised an eyebrow skeptically and blew out at the wand. The little window wobbled a bit. She squeaked in surprise.

“A little bit harder, maybe?” She could _hear_ the laughter in his voice. Hmph. Eyes narrowed in determination, she puckered up her lips into a tiny ‘o’ like she’d seen him do and blew out as hard as she could.

She squealed again as another cascade of bubbles erupted from the wand, which she somehow managed not to drop. She looked up at Arthur with a smug grin. She’d done it!

He was smiling, his eyes sparkling the same way they had when he’d asked if she knew what rubber ducks were, that day it all began. She watched with a fond smile as he reached a hand up to a bubble slowly floating toward him. He blinked in surprise when it popped as soon as he touched it, fizzling out into drops of rainbow dust. Then he laughed.

She couldn’t look away.

=====

She didn’t know what it would take to make him see her the way she saw him.

Three years of friendship. She knew him better than anyone and she _still_ didn’t understand him. Not that it surprised her at this point.

Sure, he spent a lot of time with her, but she didn’t know if it was because he genuinely liked her company or he didn’t really have anyone else. He seemed interested when she rambled about her day, but it was possible that he was just being kind. They ate dinner together more often than not, sat together in the library to study, spent evenings reading Shakespeare and Dickens by the Great Lake, but he never sat too close, was careful not to touch her too often, and he’d tensed up so much when she put her hand on his shoulder that one time that she’d never tried it again.

She’d think her insecurities were getting the better of her, but last week had made her reconsider.

He’d been strangely lacking in hesitation when she’d asked if he’d fancy getting a butterbeer together at the next Hogsmeade visit, a glamour she’d been practicing for weeks covering her flaming cheeks. He’d agreed cheerily, and she’d spent the next week trying not to explode with happiness, making sure to act the same as always around him, not wanting to take things too fast, but then they went, Molly in Taylor’s second-prettiest dress with her hair in a fetching up do and Arthur in his favourite worn jumper. He grinned at her, “I didn’t know you owned dresses,” and laughed, and he apologized and moved away when she brushed her hand against his, and he sat across from her and talked more about his new Rubix cube than he did about himself and she realized that to him, it was just two friends getting a drink. Nothing more.

She hid her disappointment with a plastic grin that crinkled at the corners like that cellotape in his damn shoebox.

She didn’t understand him. She didn’t know how to tell him.

She wanted to scream.

=====

 _Whose idea was this?_ Heart pounding in her chest, she handed him the goblet.

“Thanks, Molly,” He grinned at her like he always did. She was surprised her heart hadn’t burst out of her rib cage. _tap, tap, tappity tap_. “I’m glad you’re here. This would’ve been unbearable otherwise. I can’t believe I let Frank drag me here.”

She hummed distractedly. Somewhere nearby, Taylor and the girls were watching, she knew. The music floated gently around them. Christmas trees stood at regular intervals around the great hall, sprigs of enchanted mistletoe hanging from the ceiling strategically over punch bowls and snacks tables, catching unsuspecting hungry students unawares. Couples twirled and swayed on the dance floor. She caught Taylor’s piercing gaze from where she was waltzing with a tall Ravenclaw she’d been eyeing for weeks. She winked at her.

Arthur was saying something about classes. She nodded along, unable to look him in the eye. She forced her hands not to shake.

She tried not to stare as he took a sip from the cup. Her heart was pounding.

“Molly? Are you-“ she looked up at him. And she saw it happen, just as Penny had said it would. His eyes glazed over, his pupils widened till there was barely a sliver of blue around them. Wide and filmy, like his bubble wand. Shining like rainbows.

“It’s you.” His cheeks turned a shade of pink they’d never been before. “Molly,” he breathed. She’d never heard him sound like that.

Her feet moved of their own accord. She grabbed him by the sleeve of his ratty old jumper and dragged him out of the Hall. Penny shot her a mischievous grin as she passed her.

=====

“Sweetheart, what?” Her heart clenched at the words, uttered so breathily and dazed. She pulled him into an abandoned classroom and shoved him against the wall, covering his mouth with her palm, trying to calm herself down. Once the blood stopped rushing in her ears, she looked up at him. His pupils were still dark, bottomless pits. He looked at her like he couldn’t look away. She dropped her gaze and pulled her hand away.

She jumped when arms snaked around her waist. “ _Molly_ ,” that voice again, it sounded so _wrong_ and there was hot breath on her neck and she’d dreamed about this, and “ _I love you,”_ and it was everything she’d ever wanted but _not like this_ , and when she felt lips brush against her collar bone she shoved him away as hard as she could, and he stumbled back and looked at her with such confusion and _hurt_ and oh no, what had she _done_ ,

“Darling, what’s wrong?” She took a step back and he fell to his knees in front of her, grabbing her hand and holding it to his lips. “I’m sorry. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.” His eyes were focused on her. Like she was the only thing he could see. She couldn’t look away. “I’d do anything for you, my love. You know that.”

She gulped. No. This was not what she – no.

“I’d climb the tallest mountain,” he kissed her wrist and she flinched, “and brave the fiercest flames if it would prove how much I love you. I would jump off the tallest tower-“

“No need for that,” she interrupted hastily, rummaging through the pockets she’d magicked onto Penny’s third best dress. “Just, aha!” she nearly wept in relief as she extracted the little vial. “Just drink this, love,” she gulped, cursing herself for the slip when his eyes lit up. “It’ll all be alright.”

“Is that all?” He took the vial with his free hand, refusing to let go of her hand. He looked quizzically at the bottle and laughed. “You’re so strange, Molly. Maybe that’s why I love you so much. But there’s also your hair that shines like the sunset, your chocolatey eyes I can drown in, your little button nose-”

“Please, just drink it,” she couldn’t stop her voice from shaking.

“Anything for you,” he grinned at her, but his eyes were all _wrong_ and she tried to take her hand back but his grip tightened enough to hurt.

She held her breath as he pulled the cork out with his teeth and spat it out to the side, eyes never leaving hers. He tipped his head back and emptied it down his throat. She watched his throat jump as he swallowed.

“Now, where were-“

The change was almost instantaneous. His eyes lost that unnatural sheen, his pupils shrank and familiar blue eyes looked up at her, mouth still open. His brow furrowed.

He was looking at her face and she tried to say something, anything, but she was frozen, unable to move, unable to think, and his eyes dropped to their hands and widened and he dropped her hand like he’d been burned. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled back, away from her. His back hit the wall with a soft thud.

“Molly, what-“ he couldn’t say anything else, just stared at her. There was no warmth behind his gaze. He looked so confused. So _scared_.

What had she _done_.

“Arthur,” she whispered hoarsely, “Arthur, I-“

“Molly, what is this? What did I-“

She felt tears welling up in her eyes. “Arthur, I’m so sorry.”

And she fled.

=====

It was two weeks after the Christmas Ball and Molly missed Arthur.

She had no right to, she knew. After what she’d done, she didn’t deserve his friendship. She knew that.

It didn’t stop her from missing him.

Her heart ached when she sat in the library alone, when he walked into the Great Hall for dinner and walked right back out when he saw her at the table. When he looked stoically at the floor every time they passed each other in the corridors or the common room, when she peeked at him from between books on the shelves in the library and saw him nibbling the end of his pen, when he tensed imperceptibly when she entered the room. He doesn’t think she noticed.

But she did. She noticed.

She wondered if she’d ever get over it. She doubted it.

She’d been so desperate to make him look at her, and now he couldn’t bear to. How ironic.

=====

January fades into February and the pain is still there but she’s used to it. She’s glad for it. She deserves the punishing crack of her heart when she sees him sitting by the Lake all alone with his box of wonders, the burning behind her eyes when he turns on his heel and walks away from her when she tries to approach him, the ache in her chest as she remembers, unbidden, the feeling of his arms around her. Sometimes she even takes comfort in the shards of guilt and longing that pierce through her gut every time she sees that familiar mop of red hair.

Taylor and Penelope tell her it’s no big deal. She tried, it didn’t work out, there are plenty of fish in the sea. And she’s pretty enough, even with that wild hair, she could do so much better, honestly.

She tunes them out, mostly.

She can’t even remember whose idea it’d been, Penny stealing the pages on love potions from her older sister’s Advanced Potions text and Taylor smuggling pearl dust and carefully ‘ _stasis’_ ed ashwinder eggs from Slughorn’s potion stores in the dead of night, the two of them jumping on her bed in the next morning with matching mischievous grins and a step by step plan, her own wide-eyed self eagerly nodding along and hugging them in thanks. They’d brewed the potion once the Christmas holidays began, all three of them giggling and exclaiming over the scents they’d smelled.

She thanks Merlin they’d brewed the antidote in class. “Not that you’ll be needing it,” Taylor had remarked with a smirk as she’d slipped a vial of it into her pocket. Just in case.

Her traitorous heart skips a beat when blue eyes glance in her direction at dinner, but they pass over her, unseeing, and the hopelessness she feels is crushing. She tries not to care when she sees him in the library with a Hufflepuff a year below her. Diggory, she thinks his name is.

She wished he was as easy to replace as she was.

=====

Valentine’s Day is a splash of cold water in an already icy numbness. She sees red cheeks under wide blue eyes as long fingers open a sparkling pink envelope and tells herself she isn’t allowed to feel jealous. She vanishes the crumpled up attempts at a reconciliatory Valentine’s card piled at the foot of her bed and screams into her pillow. She feels a little bit better.

She’s walking through the corridors aimlessly, waving as she passes the Fat Lady for the third time. All her friends have gone to Hogsmeade and she wasn’t in the mood to play gooseberry, and there’s nowhere she wants to go that doesn’t remind her of Arthur so she heads nowhere, her mind lost in thoughts and memories, fleeting and flying past too fast for them to cause too much pain. She even manages smiles at the good ones.

She turns the corner and suddenly there’s an arm pulling her by the wrist and pushing her against the wall and she’s frozen in shock and then her wrists are held tightly by one hand and a boy with a blue tie is leering down at her. “Hey, pretty thing,” and there’s a hand on the wall next to her head, “How about a Valentine’s day kiss?” and her mind is reeling and suddenly the shock gives way to fear and there’s a scream gathering in her throat when there’s a shout from the other end of the corridor and the boy turns a fraction, distracted.

She’s about to knee him in the groin when a familiar spell hits him right in the face and he freezes like a board and falls to the side, the grip on her wrists taking Molly down with him.

There’s a beat of frozen silence, and then she’s scrambling to her knees and yanking her hands free, rubbing her sore wrist and looking up with wide eyes at her savior.

Arthur Weasley stands three feet away, looking at the floor. She opens her mouth. And closes it.

“Thank y-“

“Are you-“

They fall silent.

Molly slowly gets to her feet, looking at Arthur warily. She’s scared if she moves too quickly, he’ll run.

“How are-“

“I’m sorr-“

Silence again. She looks at the floor, biting her lip. She’d dreamed of this for weeks and now, she was fighting every instinct in her telling her to run away.

She takes a deep breath and braces herself.

“I’m sorry, Arthur.”

His head snaps up, wild blue eyes meeting hesitant brown. He looks just as scared as he’d been in that room, all those weeks ago.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he murmurs, and she looks away, partly in shame and partly because she can’t stand to see him look at her like that, like she was some sort of monster.

Maybe she was.

She hears a sigh. “Why did you do it?”

Confusion. “Why do you think?”

“There are easier ways to humiliate someone.”

She flinches. Is that what he thinks? She really was a monster. “No, that’s not-“

“If I was too eccentric, or, or boring, or dumb,”

“No, it’s not-“

“No one was _forcing_ you to spend time with me,”

“You don’t understand,”

“I thought we were _friends_ , how _stupid_ ,”

“I JUST WANTED YOU TO SEE ME!”

Silence. She claps her hands over her mouth. Forces back her tears.

When she looks up, he’s staring at her. “What.”

She drops her hands and sighs. Might as well get this over with. “I just, you’re just, you never saw me the way I saw you,” her shoulders slump, but she plows on. “You’re so happy in your own little world, with your shoebox and I always felt like you made time to meet me outside that world, but I always, I just,” she can’t stop the words now if she tries, “I just wanted to be a part of that world. I wanted you to notice _me_ the way you notice new articles about muggle buildings in the Prophet every morning. And I tried so hard but you never seemed to care.”

He’s staring at her, still wide eyed. But the fear was gone. She looks away, unable to read the emotion in them. It makes her heart skip a beat all the same.

“I didn’t know how to tell you I liked you. I tried, but you never understood. And maybe I should’ve tried to be clearer but I was desperate and the Christmas ball came up and my friends and I, we came up with this _stupid_ idea and I’m so sorry, Arthur-“

“I thought you hated me.”

She stares at him, forgetting what she was going to say. “What.”

“You ran away,” he swallows, and took a hesitant step toward her, then another, until he was just a foot away. “At first, I thought someone spiked my drink, and you ran away because who wouldn’t, after that display? I was too embarrassed to approach you,” he takes a breath, appearing to brace himself. “But you had the antidote. You gave me the antidote. And you brought me the drink, I remembered. I didn’t understand. I remember you looking at me, horrified. Trying to pull your hand away. Running from me like I’d hurt you,” his voice breaks, but he doesn’t stop, “I tried for weeks to make sense of it, but I couldn’t. And I thought it was all some stupid prank. I thought-“ He hesitates.

She stares at him with wide eyes. “Arthur, I-“

“I thought you’d found out I liked you,” he blurts, and his eyes widen like he hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but the words settle in the air between them, stiff and breakable, and he looks away quickly, “And I- I thought you didn’t like me back. Thought you hated the idea of me liking you so much that you tried to humiliate me.”

She’s frozen with shock. He swallows. “I- I jumped to conclusions, I realize that now. I was hurt, and I-“ He looks at her with some effort. “I’m sorry, Molly.”

She can’t take it anymore. “Shut up, dummy.” He looks at her, surprised, then his lips curl into a smile, small and tentative. She smiles back, and holds out her hand. “Start over?”

He nods, eyes shining. “Hi, I’m Arthur Weasley.”

“And I’m Molly Prewett. Nice to meet you.”

“You know, your hair is _really_ red.”

She laughs, deep and full, and it feels foreign, yet familiar in her throat, like a favourite book that hasn’t been read in ages, and he smiles, eyes warm and blue as the sky outside the window and she feels hope swell in her chest, dizzying and terrifying and wonderful all at once.

She grips his hand a fraction tighter. He squeezes back.

“So you do see me?” Her cheeks pink up the slightest bit as the words escape, but she holds his soft gaze. His eyes crinkle at the corners.

“I’ve never quite been able to look away.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for taking the time to read! I hope you liked it!
> 
> Kudos and comments are much appreciated <3


End file.
